International business has increased in recent years. Accordingly, opportunities to communicate with foreigners using foreign languages have also increased. For example, assume that two persons having different native languages have a chat via the Internet. If the two persons have different language levels, they may not be able to communicate with each other smoothly. In such a situation, one of the two persons who has a lower language level usually obtains a translation of a hard-to-understand word possibly included in a message sent from the other person by using an electronic dictionary or a translation site. However, it takes time and effort to do such work. Even if such work can be done with one click or can be done by simply positioning a mouse cursor over a hard-to-understand word, the complexity of the work becomes non-negligible if the frequency of translation is increased.
For this reason, technologies for automatically consulting a dictionary to examine the meanings of words have been proposed. According to a technology disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2000-89882, if a sentence display window is selected, a sentence displayed in the window is divided into words, a dictionary is consulted to examine the meanings of only words corresponding to a given level among the divided words, and the dictionary-consulted words and their typical meanings are displayed at a glance in a meaning list display window.
Among technologies related to language learning are a system for allowing a user to learn a language with pleasure using a cell phone or the like according to the user's learning level (see, e.g., Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2004-151421) and a dictionary search apparatus in which history information on searched keywords accumulated for each user is secondarily used so that the history information is presented to each user (see, e.g., Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2005-293115).
However, in the technology disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2000-89882, the language level used to determine whether a dictionary need be consulted is a static criterion. In general, the language level of a user with respect to a particular language varies with a lapse of time and the usage situation of the language. If a dictionary need be consulted is determined according to such a static criterion, the determination result may not match the user's current language level.
As for the technologies disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication Nos. 2004-151421 and 2005-293115, neither can determine whether a dictionary need be consulted to examine the meaning of a word.
These problems occur not only when a user attempts to obtain a translation of a word in a language different from the user's native language but also when a user attempts to pronounce a hard-to-pronounce word or understand a hard-to-understand word in the user's native language.